The reason given was "Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for certain sexually oriented materials or services or for items that could be considered obscene". This is wrong/false on so many levels. We used PayPal only as a means to receive voluntary donations from people who wanted to support further development of Voat and to help pay for our hosting fees. This is beyond crazy.

According to PayPal User Agreement, our funds can be kept by PayPal for 180 days. I requested further clarification from PayPal, but I would like to advise everyone who planned to donate to Voat - to NOT do so via PayPal.

Honestly, I don't know what I expected when I trusted PayPal with our donation money. I apologize to everyone who donated to us through PayPal and I will badge everyone who did so even if the funds are never released by PayPal.

Who is "they"? I feel like some of you think far too highly of yourselves or the drama that went down. To Reddit staff, it was nothing more than a nuisance they had to deal with for a few days. It was a bigger problem for the mods of subreddits that got flooded with FPH stuff, and they aren't Reddit employees. The site went through similar shitstorm when /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were banned. Nothing came of it. They didn't form an internet hit squad to go after users who went to other sites, etc.

Now could some group of individual Reddit users be tipping off PayPal and the others about Voat having some questionable content to try to get their PayPal banned? Yeah, that's entirely possible. But to think it's "Reddit the company" or "the admins" doing it is just silly and paranoid, and thinking far too highly of yourselves. But to be fair, the FPH people were also doing the same thing and messaging all of Reddit's advertisers and trying to get them to drop Reddit as a place they advertise. There were numerous threads about email campaigns doing exactly that. So I'd say if there was an opposite Reddit group of people doing that to Voat out of spite, it's kind of collateral damage. PayPal sucks and no one should use it in the first place. It sucks that they froze the assets though for Voat.

I just get really tired of this whole "They", and "we're at war", and "they want us to conform" stuff. In reality, Reddit, the company, doesn't give a fuck about you or the people who left. But again, there may have been some smaller group of individuals who are still trolling and fucking with Voat. But don't pretend this is some big over-reaching conspiracy to convert you to "SJWs" or something stupid like that.